How Not To Act Old

Or Pam or, God forbid, Dick. There’s a whole generation of names last popular in the 40s and 50s — Karen and Donald, Barbara and Leonard — that you’ve got to avoid if you don’t want to seem old.

Of course, you didn’t choose your own name and you’re pretty much stuck with it unless you want to do something really radical and change it to one that sounds young. Like what? Josh or Jessica, if you want to go thirtyish. Hey, but those names are aging fast, so you may want to go even younger, with a name like Justice or Jagger. Or turn the whole age-name thing on its head and pick a really old name that’s popular for babies: Moses, say, or Matilda.

For further ideas, check out one of the baby name books I wrote with Linda Rosenkrantz. You don’t have to be a baby to need a new name.

Listen, you can have all the best work in the world done. You can get botoxed and Restalyned till you’re smooth as a balloon; you can have your boobs lifted to your chin and your tummy tucked into your backbone.

But if you don’t wax down there, anybody who gets close enough is going to know you’re old.

Waxing and how to shave pubic hair are the great divide between young and older women. We came of age feeling it was sacrilegious to so much as pluck one hair. They decided to shear most of it off. And even when we thought maybe we’d surprise our husbands for our 20th anniversary, we were nervous. We saw The 40-Year-Old Virgin, after all. We knew it was going to hurt, plus be embarrassing, plus who knew what kind of diseases you might pick up.

If you’re a Waxing Virgin, don’t be afraid. It’s not that bad. And the alternative is even worse: Old below the belt.

Once, looking for a swimming hole in Maine, a local told me to turn left where the old school burned down. That’s what giving directions is like these days. In this era of Mapquest and GPS, it’s meaningless to tell someone to turn left at the church and go under the railroad trestle and look for the yellow house.

Let the computer do the work for you. If the other person gets lost, blame it on their digital guide. When we all have chips implanted in our brains, we’ll never again have any need to know where we are or where we’re going: We’ll just go and do whatever and wherever Google tells us.

It’s not the smoking of marijuana that’s the problem, exactly, though if you know where to get some, can you please let me know? No, the problem is calling it “pot.” Pot is what old hippies called it. What we called it when we used to smoke it every day. Now, it’s called “weed.” and we use a vaporizer, get with the program. Go read The Smoke Advisor if you don’t know where to find the program.

When we first tasted “ethnic” food, what counted as exotic and exciting was some stew made of indefinable ingredients and bearing a funny name. Moo goo gai pan. Spaghetti puttanesca. Pad thai. Pu pu platter.

But in this era of McDonald’s Sushi (trust me: it’s coming) and Indian frozen dinners, it’s time to update your palate. Try the Cold Jelly Chengdu Style. The Kaiseki Ryori. As long as you move beyond ordering the same thing you’ve been ordering since you were 19, you’ll be fine.

Sigh. I know, I know. I used to love Paul too. I lay on my bed with the radio pressed to my ear, singing along to “I Want To Hold Your Hand.” Wooo! I wrote Paul a letter trying to persuade him that the difference in our ages and circumstances wouldn’t and shouldn’t stand in the way of our love. And when Linda died, I was sad, but also, my heart rose in hope, just a little bit.

I still kinda think Paul is cute, jowls and all, but admitting you think so will get you branded as old. Why? Because, as my daughter says, Paul McCartney is “crusty.” Ew. Some male movie stars — think Sean Connery — can hold onto their sex appeal seemingly forever, but poor Paul doesn’t seem to be one of them.

When old people want to go on vacation to, say, Italy next summer, what do they do? They buy tickets. Book a hotel. Research restaurants and make reservations. They plan, in other words, just like they plan dinner parties for three weeks from Saturday, and buy theatre tickets for Thanksgiving, and make a mammogram appointment for April ’09.

If you want not to act old, you’ve got to be a little looser than that. A lot looser. Decide what you’re going to do on the spur of the moment, depending on how you feel. Make travel arrangements on the fly. Throw out your calendars and datebooks. Be here now.

Old people talk into their cell phones as if the phone was a tin can attached to a string, and the string was so long that the person with their ear pressed to the other tin can was in China.

Although cell phones are extremely tiny and not connected to any wires, they’re really more efficient than that. You can talk in a normal voice — no: you can talk in a softer than normal voice — and the other person will hear you. We promise. Sssssh. That’s better.

You’ve been there: In line behind the middle-aged woman who says, “Wait a minute! I think I have the exact change!,” and then proceeds to rummage through the recesses of her bag in search of the precise assortment of quarters and dimes and nickels and pennies that make up the price of her knee-high hose or chicken pot pie.

The reasoning seems to be that, if you pay for something with exact change, you at one stroke declutter your purse and get whatever you’re buying for less. You’ve traded in all those heavy, jangly spare coins for a nourishing meat pie! And acted like you’re doing the poor cashier a big fat favor in the process.

But listen, change is inevitable. No matter how many pennies you get rid of, more will always come your way. And you’re just annoying everybody in the meantime.

Admit it: You don’t really know what hookup (or hook-up or hook up) means. Is it meeting for coffee? Kissing? Having sex? Watching television together? Or getting engaged?

The point is that you should avoid doing or even saying anything if you’re not certain of the implications. As cool and casual as it may make you feel, it’s probably best not to suggest to your boss that you hook up later on this evening. Maybe not smart to ask your teenager whether they hooked up with any of their friends last night. Might not be wise to say wistfully to your neighbor that you wish you could hook up more often.

So what DOES hookup mean? Anything and everything, apparently. Maybe if we get under the covers and turn out the lights for long enough, the phrase and all its implications will just go away.